try to take precautions. What precautions? I don’t know. Surely he must know I have a firearm, but I don’t think he can get one in because he has to assume the metal detector would alert me. He may use the stairs, and that could be a problem even if I hear him coming. If that happens, I’ll have to play it by ear.
[Pause]
Bill’s .38 is my belt; the package I taped to the elevator ceiling is my suspenders. My insurance. I have a picture of it. He’ll want it, but there’s nothing in that package but a tube of lipstick.
I have done the best I can, Ralph, but it may not be enough. In spite of all my planning there’s a chance I won’t come out of this alive. If that’s the case, I need you to know how much your friendship has meant to me. If I do die, and you choose to continue what I’ve started, please be careful. You have a wife and son.
8
It’s 5:43. Time is racing, racing.
That fracking traffic jam! If he comes early, before I’m ready…
If that happens I’ll make something up to keep him downstairs for a few minutes. I don’t know what, but I’ll think of something.
Holly powers up the reception area’s desktop. She has her own office, but this is the computer she prefers, because she likes to be right out front instead of buried in the back. It’s also the computer she and Jerome used when they got tired of listening to Pete complain about having to climb to the fifth floor. What they did certainly wasn’t legal, but it solved the problem and that information should still be in this computer’s memory. It better be. If it’s not, she’s fracked. She may be fracked anyway, if Ondowsky uses the stairs. If he does that, she’ll be ninety per cent sure that he’s come to kill her rather than pay her.
The desktop is a state-of-the-art iMac Pro, very fast, but today it seems to take forever booting up. While she waits, she uses her phone to email the sound file containing her report to herself. She takes a flash drive from her purse—this is the one containing the various photos Dan Bell has amassed, plus Brad Bell’s spectrograms—and as she plugs it into the back of the computer, she thinks she hears the elevator moving. Which is impossible, unless someone else is in the building.
Someone like Ondowsky.
Holly flies to the office door with the gun in her hand. She throws the door open, sticks her head out. Hears nothing. The elevator is quiet. Still on five. It was her imagination.
She leaves the door open and hurries back to the desk to finish up. She has fifteen minutes. That should be enough, assuming she can remove the fix Jerome figured out and reinstate the computer glitch that had everyone climbing the stairs.
I’ll know, she thinks. If the elevator goes down after Ondowsky gets off, I’m okay. Golden. If it doesn’t…
But it’s no good thinking about that.
9
The stores are open late because of the Christmas season—the sacred time when we honor the birth of Jesus by maxing out our credit cards, Barbara thinks—and she sees at once that she won’t find parking on Buell. She takes a ticket at the entrance to the parking garage across from the Frederick Building and finally finds a space on the fourth level, just below the roof. She hurries to the elevator, looking around constantly, one hand in her purse. Barbara has also seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages.
When she arrives safely on the street, she hurries to the corner just in time to catch the walk light. On the other side she looks up and sees a light on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building. At the next corner, she turns right. A little way down the block is an alley marked with signs reading NO THROUGH TRAFFIC and SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY. Barbara turns down it and stops at the side entrance. She’s bending to tap in the door code when a hand grips her shoulder.
10
Holly opens the email she’s sent herself and moves the attachment to the flash drive. She hesitates for a moment, looking at the blank title strip below the drive’s icon. Then she types IF IT BLEEDS. A good enough name. It’s the story of that thing’s fracking life, after all, she thinks, it’s what keeps it alive. Blood and pain.
She ejects